The preface opens the book with a commentary on the organic relationship shared between the United Nations Organization and the question of Palestine. It does so through a brief discussion of the 1948 Reparations Case, in which the International Court of Justice affirmed the international legal personality of the United Nations arising from the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator for Palestine

This chapter argues that an analysis of the racial capitalist state cracks open a subterranean archive of anarchism. Drawing on the queer utopianism of José Esteban Muñoz and the other-worldly space-jazz of Sun Ra, I theorise the antipolitical as a utopian worldmaking project which exists beyond bourgeois modernity and its ideas of science, rationality, and linear progress. I contrast this with recent attempts to ‘decolonise’ and ‘globalise’ anarchism, which largely have focused on radical labour and trade union movements in the global periphery. Unlike these traditions, the antipolitical is a promise of liberation whose source exceeds the profane and material, and which finds inspiration in dreams and fantasy, the magical and the divine.

Resisting Racial Capitalism begins with the premise that we need to look beyond the hegemony of the state and its grammars of justice. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson, it argues that the state is not a neutral arbiter of justice that can or should be appealed to for rights, recognition, or restitution. Rather, the state is a relation of violence which is central to racial capitalism. This is a type of violence which cannot be reformed away through a politics that merely strives to make oppressive institutions more diverse, inclusive, or tolerant. As a permanent war waged on those deemed delinquent, wayward, and undeserving, the state must itself be abolished.

Rather than within the UN system itself, the origins of Palestines international legal subalternity are located in British secret treaty-making and diplomacy between 1915 and 1947, particularly as institutionalized within the League of Nations system. Although the literature on the history of Palestine in this period tends to focus on political themes, this chapter examines this period through the cross-cutting theme of the Eurocentricity of international law and organization then prevailing. It is set against the backdrop of the global paradigm shift then occurring in the international system, from one based on the norms and values of the late-imperial age grounded in an international rule by law, to one based on those of an emerging liberal western rights-based discourse, ostensibly based on an international rule of law. The main systemic issue that emerges for Palestine at this time is its contingent and subaltern status in the international legal order, a status that was eventually placed before the UN in 1947.

The introduction provides the book’s framework. The UN is regarded as the guardian of the rules-based international legal order, but it is often not faithful in discharging this role. Building on the Third World Approaches to International Law school of thought, the chapter argues the existence of ‘international legal subalternity’ – a condition that marks the relationship of the global south with international law from its modern European origins to the present day. This condition is marked by the UN’s repeated representation of international law as a means through for historically disenfranchised peoples to achieve justice, but which is perpetually kept out of reach. International legal subalternity is the result of the creation and use of international law as a tool by hegemonic power, the manifestation of which is the production and reproduction of global subaltern underclasses who have little or no say in the substantive formation or application of the law that purports to govern them. The UN’s management of the question of Palestine most aptly illustrates this, as a critical examination of key moments from 1947 to the present will demonstrate.

Chapter 3 examines policing as a street-level form of governance which is central to racial capitalism. Focusing on the murder of Marielle Franco and police violence in Rio de Janeiro, it argues that policing functions as an ongoing war on groups and communities deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving: what I describe as a ‘war on dirt’. From Rio to London, Ireland to India, policing has been a key mechanism through which the state orders bourgeois society. Policing thus understood is a dirt-producing system which orders as it rejects, sanitizes as it represses. Drawing on afro-feminist quilombismo and recent work on black anarchism, the chapter argues that the struggle for police abolition must be anarchised and extended to target the racial capitalist state as a whole. Viewed antipolitically, abolition requires a break, not just with carcerality, but with state logics and governance in its entirety.